Impact Report

Early in his Grade 10 Old Testament course, David Grills asks his students how many sons Abraham had. No one says eight. Most have studied Genesis since kindergarten and, he says, arrive feeling: “I know this already.” Being confidently wrong is where his teaching starts.

David has taught Bible at Hamilton District Christian High since 2013. When Gideon Strauss invited him into a new master’s program for working educators, the MA-EL, he said yes. “I just wanted to be a better teacher,” he says.

What he took back to class was language “for things I was doing intuitively.” A course on reflective practice taught him to keep adjusting and to invite feedback, even a quick fist-to-five check from students. His final project, a podcast, asked how to rekindle wonder in Bible class.

Now he’s back as a PhD Junior Member, still teaching full time. “The master’s was for my students,” he says. “The PhD is for me.” His research now turns to a phenomenology of religious experience, guided by Paul Ricoeur. Time is the hard part (“I had to use every moment”), yet the work keeps coming home: a seminar presentation on Teresa of Ávila is already reshaping his New Testament class.

This fall David began teaching Reading the Bible Well for ICS, to teachers who are working to improve their craft, some of them years into their careers. “They have the same aha moments as my 15-year-olds,” he says. “Here they are expressing, ‘I didn’t know this about the Bible.’” He is learning along with both sets of students, trying to uncover just a little more of the mystery of God through the study of Scripture.

Ask Alayna Erickson what changed for her at ICS and she doesn’t point to a set of conclusions. “I have found that doing philosophy at ICS has shaped how I think far more than just what I ought to think,” she says. “It’s a bit messier that way, but it is something I have been learning to embrace and even love.”

She arrived without a plan. Her undergraduate philosophy professor, Dr. Matt Bonzo, an ICS alumnus, encouraged her to keep going, and she had “an inkling that I wasn’t quite ready to be done with the work I had started.” She loved what she was reading and writing, and the people around her saw something worth pursuing.

At ICS, that work stopped feeling like something extra added on top of her life. She came to see philosophy as a vocation more than a career, something that “integrally shapes how I think and how I think about thinking itself.”

The change began early, in a course on Reformational philosophy. Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven didn’t end up at the centre of her studies, but the course shaped how she goes about doing philosophy as a Christian. It had her asking what makes a philosophy Christian at all, and how her deepest beliefs about God, the world, and her place within it shape the rest of her pursuits.

Thinking this way also meant thinking out loud before she was sure. In-person conversation comes easily to Alayna, but in online seminars she hesitated to offer an idea that wasn’t yet fully formed. She had to trust that an unfinished thought was worth sharing, and to step into conversations where she felt out of her depth. That, too, was learning how to think rather than what. “It took a while,” she says of finding her voice, “but I think I slowly started to find it.”

Partway through a semester with Bob Sweetman, Caleb Ratzlaff felt the class must be lost. By the end he saw that Bob had walked this path before and had been guiding them the whole time. “I was discovering something for myself,” Caleb says, “even though Bob had been there already.”

He had come from McMaster Divinity College, where classmates were focused on career preparation and he had questions that he didn’t feel free to ask. A course on Hannah Arendt with Allyson Carr showed him that at ICS he could.

With Nik Ansell, Bob Sweetman, and Shannon Hoff, he came to see that not being certain is not a deficit but a feature of the human condition, one that leaves room for love, freedom, and relationship. Shannon, his advisor, sat down with him to work through the basics of writing, and fellow students helped him sharpen his arguments.

After ICS he pastored Westview Christian Fellowship in St. Catharines for seven years and took the classroom into the sanctuary. His sermons became teaching time that invited feedback. During a series on Christ’s grandmothers—women who, he says, took back ownership of their stories after abuse—a woman in the congregation told him, “I didn’t realize that Scripture contained my story.”

Then he ran for city council in St. Catharines, where the same question applies: who has power, and who is missing? He calls it “the political question.” On council he goes looking for those voices, canvassing apartment buildings and listening to tenants. Re-elected this fall, he’s begun working with the Golden Horseshoe Co-operative Housing Federation, which is building 492 co-op homes in the city.

Of the people he studied beside at ICS, he says: “My approach to Scripture would definitely have been a lot different without them, and now, my approach to politics and city council.”